Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The artist Marco Ospina begins by criticizing Colombian painters who value volume over content and as a result produce totally insignificant work. According to Ospina, there are substantial theoretical lapses in these paintings, which he dismisses as [...]

The historian Alfredo Armas Alfonzo studies mid-twentieth century Venezuelan art (between 1940 and 1958) through the survey of the first nineteen years of art salons in the country. Following his analysis of the sociocultural context that certain [...]

In this document, Amalia Mesa-Bains writes about the women’s practice of altar-making, suggesting that while there has been a decline in the performance of and engagement with popular ritual in contemporary life, the creation of altars as both [...]

This essay by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is included in the 1981 catalogue of selected works from the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, California. Ybarra-Frausto presents a historiography documenting the trajectory of Mexican American artistic traditions [...]

Puerto Rican historian and curator Flavia Marichal Lugo offers an overview of the history of the woodcut in Puerto Rico. She explains that the medium took hold on the island in 1950 and its influence continually grew from then on thanks to the [...]

In June 1960, the exhibition, 3000 años de arte colombiano [3000 Years of Colombian Art], was held in Miami and Washington. The journal Lámpara [Lamp] (Bogotá, published 1952–85) printed a supplement with writings by the curators who performed [...]

The architect Attílio Corrêa Lima presents the book, Avant-projet d’aménagement et d’extension de la ville de Niterói au Brésil[Draft Proposal for the Development and Expansion of the City of Niterói, Brazil], which includes the thesis he [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon. However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

The essay “Bordes del dibujo” [Borders of Drawing] by Ana María Lozano is the theoretical-curatorial commentary on the exhibition of the same name that was presented at the Museo de Arte at the National University of Colombia in 2007. It was [...]

This brief but thorough review by the Argentine critic Damián Bayón explores the development of Argentine art from the eighteenth century to the present day. He mentions artists, architects, and sculptors who have helped to define the concept of [...]

Written by art historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, this document represents a chronology of important social and cultural developments in Chicano art. Beginning in 1959 with an exhibition organized around the MAPA (Mexican American Political Association [...]

This text by Gabriel García Márquez published in the weekly cultural supplement to the Cali-based newspaper El Pueblo is the prologue to the portfolio Graficario de la Lucha popular en Colombia (1977). In his critical analysis of ways of disguising [...]

This text is the second of three parts of the essay “Cómo la pintura ha buscado al Perú” written by Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The text was not intended to be “an aesthetic theory,” but rather “a sociological interrogation” geared [...]

In this text, Raúl María Pereira reflects on the history of painting in Peru, affirming that the Incan “genius in form and color” lived on despite the Spanish conquest, not as a parallel or marginal entity, but as a force that acted on “the [...]

In this document, artist and art historian Eva Cockroft details the history and development of the Chicano mural movement in the United States, focusing on its beginnings as a means of voicing solidarity and political resistance during the United [...]

The author reproduced an article originally published in the newspaper El Tiempo on June 6, 1885, regarding the history of masonry in Mexico; he lists the different lodges, from the founding of the first in 1806 to 1885, the date of the article’s [...]

This is a curatorial statement published in the catalog for the 1977 exhibition Dále Gas: Chicano Art of Texas. The exhibition’s curator, Santos Martinez, Jr., defines the term “Chicano” as referring to a highly politicized, radical [...]

In a continuation of an article published in Artes Visuales in 1978, Carla Stellweg provides an overview of issues relevant to Chicano art and the diverse approaches artists use to negotiate such conditions. She further outlines how early Chicano [...]

This article contains concise reports on Mexican history regarding the intellectual ideas that brought about the principle episodes of Mexico’s independent era. After a quick summary of the imposition of Catholicism on the indigenous peoples, it [...]

This article is the first of a series of three written by the critic and historian Antonio Rodríguez on the development and dissemination of the news over several centuries and historical periods in Mexico. He organized the graphic and textual [...]

This is the second of three articles written by the art critic, Antonio Rodríguez. To provide continuity with the first essay, Rodríguez reviews the progress of illustrated journalism in Mexico from the woodcut print to copper plate print. From [...]

This is the third and last article in the series by Antonio Rodríguez. In a quick history of illustrated news, he shows us how it developed from the pre-Hispanic period through the modern world of the twentieth century. In this article, Rodríguez [...]

This essay is a chapter from the book by Eduardo Dieste, Teseo, discusión estética y ejemplos, published in 1925. Many of the chapters were articles that were published since 1923 in the magazine produced by Teseo (Agrupación de Artistas y [...]

In this article the Colombian artist Marco Ospina defines painting as the art of space, form, and color. He thus rejects the idea of art as representation, instead stressing the artist’s mental experience as the source of inspiration for a painting [...]

The critic Juan Calzadilla provides a broad overview of the history of Venezuelan printmaking, from its earliest days in the nineteenth century until this essay was published in 1978. He discusses certain landmark events along the way, such as how [...]

In 1987, critic Patricia Londoño wrote the first contemporary review of the subject of photography in Colombia. The article presents in chronological order and describes the publications, exhibitions, and photographic archives used, salvaged, and [...]

In this essay, Rodrigo Facundo introduced his art project En la punta de la lengua, which took an in-depth look at how countries (for example Colombia) use photographic images in official reports on events, and the role played by memory, both [...]

Draftsman, painter, journalist, and founder of the “Escuela de Bellas Artes” mentioned in the title of this article, General Alberto Urdaneta wrote this text on the occasion of the official opening of the premises of the school on July 20, 1886, [...]

In her essay, “Escultura I: Más sobre Gego” [Sculpture I: More on Gego], Marta Traba writes an overview of twentieth-century sculpture, paying special attention to modern sculpture. She states that the history of modern sculpture is that of “a [...]

“Fotografía y sociedad” [Photography and Society], is the title of the first chapter of the book by the same name by the Colombian researcher and photographer Edward Goyeneche Gómez. The text includes a well-reasoned [...]

In this document, Amalia Mesa-Bains details the development of the Galería de la Raza [Gallery of the People], an important San Francisco cultural institution established in 1970 in the midst of the Chicano Movement. Mesa-Bains describes the ways in [...]

In the last few pages of the book Hacia la democracia: contribución al estudio de la historia económica-político-social de Venezuela (Mexico City, 1939), the Venezuelan historian and diplomat Carlos Irazábal acknowledges his country’s [...]

By focusing on the work of two Chicano muralists who were active in the 1970s, Leo Tanguma and Emigdio Vásquez, art historian Shifra M. Goldman examines some of the historical experiences represented in the work of Chicano artists. According to [...]

Puerto Rican historian Eugenio Fernández Méndez submits a “descriptive and literary review of how artists from different periods have viewed the history of Puerto Rico.” He remarks that it is important to be universal, but claims that one must [...]

In this text, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto offers a history of Chicano cultural production from the 1960s to the 1990s, including the visual arts, music, literature, theater, and the history of community-based cultural institutions. He describes the changes [...]

This text is the introduction to the master’s thesis “Sujeto es Predicado” by Sylvia Juliana Suárez, defended before the History and Theory of Art and Architecture Department of the Universidad Nacional of Colombia. It consists of a study of [...]

In this introductory essay, French journalist Marcel Niedergang provides an overview of twentieth-century Latin American economic history. The author begins by situating Latin America within its geographic location, briefly touching on the cultures [...]

Jacinto Quirarte’s essay provides an overview of the development of Chicano art from its beginnings as a cultural wing of the Chicano socio-political movement. Quirarte focuses specifically on artists groups, cultural centers, and alternative [...]

In “La crítica de arte en el Salón de 1899: una aproximación a los procesos de configuración del campo artístico en Colombia,”historian and museologist William Alfonso López Rosas analyzes the criticism published on the Sección de Bellas [...]

In his introduction, Juan E. Ríos—the author of this overview of Peruvian painting from the first half of the twentieth century—describes Peruvian art as “the creation of a visual equivalent of reality, rather than a mere copy of it” denying [...]

This selection of documents begins with Raymond Poincaré’s—the future president of France (1913-20)—preface to Francisco García-Calderón’s book, Les démocraties latines d’Amérique. Poincaré praises Calderón’s book and traces the [...]

In this statement, Arturo Uslar Pietri posits that the history of Latin America has been a process of raising awareness of the region’s evolution, which serves as the basis for the development of a new world born of the modern age. In an encounter [...]

The Uruguayan art historian and executive publisher of the magazine Arte en Colombia-Art Nexus, Ivonne Pini wonders, “How should the visual arts address our past?” She points out that the “rupture of modernism” did not happen in Latin America [...]

This excerpt from Jacinto Quirarte’s book, Mexican American Artists, includes the introduction, chapters 4 through 8, and a short conclusion. In the introduction, the author explores Chicano identity and the unifying elements of Chicano art. While [...]

Lucy Lippard recounts a history of art in the United States during the 1970s and ‘80s centered on cultural mixing. She begins by attesting to the failure of the idea of the “melting pot” in the United States. Instead, she argues that Western [...]

In this article the writer Mariano Picón Salas provides a concise summary of what he believes to be the most distinctive aspects of Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century as viewed, in particular, from the perspective of a cultural [...]

Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s essay provides an introduction to the general history of photography. He traces its development from the original camera obscura that has been with us since time immemorial, and recognizes the contributions of those who [...]

In this document Shifra Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto outline an extensive model for the study of a social history of Chicano art, beginning with a consideration of the cultural theories of Ernesto Galarza and anthropologists Americo Paredes and [...]

This chapter of the encyclopedia Historia del arte colombiano [History of Colombian Art] written by Germán Rubiano is divided into three parts. In the first part, Rubiano discusses the art that is referred to in the chapter and that he considers to [...]

In this bilingual essay, Chicana art historian and curator Tere Romo delineates three distinct periods of poster production, tracing the factors that shaped the development of iconography and visual styles, as well as the varying degrees to which [...]